Manuscripts

Reed Peck memoir

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Description: The original of the Reed Peck Manuscript, an 1839 memoir criticizing Mormon actions in Missouri during the conflicts of 1838. Peck opens with a prophecy about "redeeming" Zion (Missouri) through armed force, the "interpretation" of which led Joseph Smith to call for volunteers to march to Clay County "under arms" (they were waylaid by a cholera outbreak). Peck goes on to relate alleged financial and power conflicts in Kirtland, Ohio, between, among others, Joseph and Hyrum Smith, Sidney Rigdon, and Oliver Cowdery, as well as disagreements over where in Missouri to establish a Mormon settlement. He writes that once the Mormons had settled in Caldwell County, the Mormon presidency became a "despotic government" and that it proposed a policy, encouraged by Rigdon, that dissenters from the Church be killed so that "they would not be capable of injuring the church." He goes on to say that the Mormon leadership demanded that all followers consecrate their property to the Church or be turned over to the "terrible brother of Gideon" (Jared Carter) for punishment. Peck continues that he and some others were "ever after ... opposed to the rule of the presidency" because "their word was law in religious, civil and military matters." He writes of the formation of a "secret military organization" (the Danites) by Carter, George W. Robinson, and Sampson Avard "under the instruction of the presidency," and of pretending to join the group, although he avoided taking the official oath and "declared to my trusty friends that I would never act in the office." He also remembers that Carter was later found guilty of criticizing the presidency, and alleges that he heard Joseph Smith say he would have "cut his throat on the spot" if he had been alone. The remainder of the memoir recounts the events of the Mormon War, in which Peck claims that hostilities between Mormons and Gentiles were inflamed by Joseph Smith. He begins with disputes over an election in Daviess County, leading to a "skirmish" which he says was exaggerated into accounts of a "bloody massacre of ... Mormons," leading non-Mormon citizens to fear retaliation and call for the expulsion of the Mormons from Daviess County. He criticizes the Mormons for initiating confrontations, plundering goods, and for attacking the militia under Capt. Bogart at the Battle of Crooked River, but he condemns the attack on Mormons in the Haun's Hill Massacre. He concludes his narrative of events with the arrest and subsequent escape of the Smiths, Rigdon, Wight, Parley Pratt, and others. He closes the manuscript by condemning Smith and the Church ("how can he [Smith] expect to support his character as a man of God when facts are exhibited to the world in their true light," he wrote) and by listing the sources for his narrative, much of which was allegedly based on his own eyewitness accounts. Other individuals mentioned in the memoir include W.W. Phelps, Edward Partridge, John Corrill, and Dimmock Baker Huntington. There appear to be pages missing after page 152.
Type: Manuscripts(Opens in new tab)
Production date: 1839.
Call number: mssHM 54458
Creator: Peck, Reed(Opens in new tab)
Provenance: Gift of Fawn Brodie, December 31, 1946.
Dimensions: 17 cm
Find out more: View in the Library catalog(Opens in new tab)

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